Magical creatures
AN APPRECIATION OF WEASELS
Slinky and silkily furred with an elegant snout and beady black eyes, the weasel is a sweet-looking little mammal. But it also has an image problem – literally, for starters. Weasels are rarely seen, except as a streak of chestnut fur crossing a woodland path or road, too busy pursuing their dietary staples of voles and mice to be spotted at leisure. And when a creature is elusive, it’s often easily misunderstood.
The weasel has good cause to be so predatory. Britain’s smallest carnivore is a murderous midget with a demanding metabolism, which means it needs to eat up to 30% of its own bodyweight in prey every day. This keeps it busy, day and night. No time for crosswords. Not even time to make a den of its own: to rest, weasels tend to lodge in the tunnels or burrows formerly home to their prey. That’s a property ladder you definitely don’t want to find yourself on. Don’t go confusing a weasel with a stoat, either. The former is about half the size of a stoat, and has a short stubby tail that’s unlike the stoat’s lengthy, black-tipped number.
To add to its image problem, the weasel emits a strong odour, marking its territory with potent secretions from its anal glands; it uses these stink bombs defensively, too, to warn off rivals. Even its name has a whiff about it, derived from wisalon, a Germanic word meaning ‘smelly’.
The word weasel has been adopted into use with a number of unfavourable meanings, suggesting that perhaps it’s the creature’s utter villainy that is to be celebrated. Someone who’s a ‘weasel’ is sly, furtive or treacherous, says the dictionary. To weasel out of something means to get out of an obligation, usually indefensibly. This is at least physically apt: weasels are very wriggly; folklore has it that a weasel is agile enough to squeeze through a wedding ring. And in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, it is weasels, along with stoats, that form a band of squatters who take over Toad Hall.
The weasel’s most well known ‘literary’ mention is in the nursery rhyme ‘ Half A Pound of Tuppenny Rice’ – originally a Victorian music hall number… So, why does the weasel go pop? There are two schools of thought: either it refers to a spinner’s weasel (a measuring wheel for yarn), the popping sound of which jolts the daydreaming textile worker back to reality. Or – more likely – ‘pop goes the weasel’ refers to a ‘weasel and stoat’, cockney rhyming slang for coat. As the money disappears (‘that’s the way the money goes’), you pawn your coat to get more – ‘pop’ being slang for pawn.
Whichever theory is correct, they certainly both absolve weasels of any wrongdoing. And quite right, too: weasels only deserve a bad press if you give them a human frame of reference. Sure, being smelly, hyperactive, murderous and antisocial aren’t qualities you’d want in a friend. But weasels are excellent at being weasels. And any sighting of this thriving, energetic hunter in the wild – however momentary – is sure to be magical.